John Keats

John Keats

26 quotes

The English Romantic poet John Keats is someone whose pithy observations have become part of everyday conversation. Whether reflecting on Beauty or Poetry, John Keats brought uncommon clarity to every subject. 36 of John Keats's sharpest quotes live here, spanning themes of Beauty, Poetry, Truth, Nature, and Love. Among their most shared lines: "Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever."

“I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.”

— John Keats

Love

All Quotes by John Keats

“Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.”

— John Keats

Beauty

“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”

— John Keats

Poetry

“I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.”

— John Keats

Wisdom

“Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.”

— John Keats

Death

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases it will never pass into nothingness.”

— John Keats

Beauty

“'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

— John Keats

Beauty

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”

— John Keats

Death

“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

— John Keats

Poetry

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.”

— John Keats

Imagination

“Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.”

— John Keats

Nature

“There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.”

— John Keats

Failure

“There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.”

— John Keats

Nature

“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

— John Keats

Poetry

“I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.”

— John Keats

Love

“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”

— John Keats

Experience

“There is nothing stable in the world uproar's your only music.”

— John Keats

Music

“You speak of Lord Byron and me there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.”

— John Keats

Great

“My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.”

— John Keats

Imagination

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”

— John Keats

Nature

“With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

— John Keats

Beauty